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Two of the year’s biggest films (Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War) have come and gone from their premiere dates raking in hundreds of millions of dollars each. Following the relative flop that was DC’s Justice League, Marvel appears to be on top of the cinematic super hero world right now. But despite it all, you’d never know a big, exclusive, Marvel VR game is coming to the Oculus Rift sometime this year (supposedly) unless you just happened to follow the industry more closely than most.

After being announced almost a full year ago with only a handful of character announcements and a brief Comic Con appearance since, we’d started to worry about the likelihood that Marvel Powers United VR would ever see the light of day. It’s been months of silence after all.

Marvel Powers United VR is in development by Sanzaru Games, the same team behind other Rift titles like VR Sports Challenge and Ripcoil, in collaboration with Marvel and Oculus Studios. At a recent preview event for upcoming Rift games like Defector we got the chance to ask about Marvel’s status. Specifically, is it still happening?

According to Mike Doran, Oculus Studios Executive Producer on Marvel Powers United VR, there is no reason to worry:

“Everyone’s hard at work on MARVEL Powers United VR and we’re looking forward to its release later this year.”

Unfortunately that’s all they’ve got to say about that. No firm date, no milestones to mention, and no new characters. It feels odd that two of Marvel’s most successful movies to date would release without even a whiff of marketing for Powers United VR attached, but that’s the world we live in.

Are you still looking forward to Marvel Powers United VR? Fingers crossed we get to see more at E3 next month. Let us know your thoughts down in the comments below!

In wider gaming news this week, former Epic Games developer Cliff Bleszinski, best known for his work on the Gears of War series, announced the closure of his independent studio, Boss Key Productions, following the poor performance of the team’s first game, LawBreakers. In the wake of the announcement, Bleszinski has been sharing concept art for other games that studio had hoped to work on, including two VR titles that will likely never be.

Bleszinski, a noted fan of VR and even an early investor in Oculus, has long been talking about making a game for headsets at Boss Key. In fact, this time last year the developer revealed that he was pitching a full VR game to potential investors, though noted that many were “balking” at the idea.

Here’s another one, initially planned for VR, codenamed “Rover” but was shaping up to be “DogWalkers” – DOG stood for Destructive Ordnance (on the) Ground.

This ‘full’ game could have been a project initially titled Rover, as Bleszinski revealed in one tweet. The game was a multiplayer combat experience inspired by World War 2 and would have players pilot giant tanks in massive 25-player battles with five players on five teams. The concept art shows machines that wouldn’t look out of place in a Star Wars movie marching into battle. Only some of the players would pilot these machines while others operate turrets fixed to it and others repair it.

“The air in the world’s fiction was toxic so any leaks on your walker you’d have to repair quick or get gas masks on etc,” Bleszinski wrote. “Rappel outside to weld legs too, toss wrenches to each other etc…”

Next up is a decidedly more friendly-looking game called Donuts, which Bleszinski described as a spiritual successor to classic Atari game, Toobin. Players are cast as animals that race downstream on rubber rings. The developer labeled it as Mario Kart on water.

Here’s the silly/fun one – basically a VR spiritual sequel to Toobin, only everyone are animals – and a way to fight Seasonal Affection Disorder. (Mario Kart on water with animals in VR.)

Called “Donuts.” pic.twitter.com/wNKef9QsS4

— Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) May 15, 2018

More art. pic.twitter.com/R9I64nDJKC

— Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) May 15, 2018

Sadly it looks like these games will never come to fruition. Rover in particular sounds like something that could have really worked in VR. Bleszinski is planning to take some time off from development following Boss Keys’ closure but, as he noted on Twitter, many of these ideas were worked on by the larger team. Perhaps some of these ideas could live on in the future, then.

This year at E3 Epic Games will be bringing back the official Unreal E3 Awards. The awards will recognize developers with outstanding achievements in a variety of categories ranging from visual fidelity to originality. Unsurprisingly, your game must be made in the Unreal Engine in order to be nominated for an Unreal E3 Award.

Nominees will be announced near the end of E3 week on June 14th, 2018, with winners unveiled the following week on June 21st, 2018. Nominees and winners will be selected by the “Unreal Engine marketing and community team” according to a company representative.

The Unreal E3 Awards will nominate and award winners in five different categories:

— Eye Candy: This award is given to the most visually impressive Unreal Engine game at E3 2018 and rewards the use of leading-edge graphics that push the medium of interactive entertainment forward.
— Most Addictive: This award is given to the experience that people simply can’t put down. Nominees will make players forget about their surroundings and lead to fun-induced sleep deprivation.
— Best Original Game: This award is given to the project with huge potential as an all-new IP. Nominees will spark interest not only through gameplay, but through original characters and worlds that are put on full display during E3 2018.
— Biggest Buzz: This award is given to the project that creates the most talked about moment of E3 2018. From a major game reveal to an undeniably impressive demo or a major twist that flips the industry on its ear, this award goes to the Unreal Engine team or project that produces the most buzz.
— Unreal Underdog: This award is given to the independent team that pushes the limits to achieve an amazing showing for their title at E3 2018. Focusing on not just the product, but the people and process behind it, this award acknowledges a team’s perseverance to make a big splash and stand out from the crowd.

Winning teams from each category will receive, in addition to the recognition itself, a new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPU from NVIDIA and a new Core i7-8700K CPU from Intel. That’s a solid foundation for a powerful VR rig.

Even though there isn’t a VR-specific category in the awards, I’d imagine that plenty of VR games will see nominations in the Eye Candy and Original Game categories.

If you’d like to alert the judging committee at Epic about your Unreal Engine-powered game for consideration in the awards, you can send an email to e32018@unrealengine.com with details.

Once upon another era, every time a movie released there would be a video game of the same name to launch right alongside it. In the 16-bit era we got tons of classic releases, but eventually this practice became a race to the bottom until publishers mostly stopped it altogether. Lately, it’s starting to feel like VR is the new medium for movie tie-in experiences.

Blade Runner: Revelations is a recently released Google Daydream app that’s available on the Google Play Store and it tells a story that helps connect the two Blade Runner films together more clearly. The VR game was first announced earlier this year back at CES, but it’s not the first VR experience for the film universe — Turtle Rock Studios worked on interactive 360 experiences as well, such as Replicant Pursuit.

Visual elements present a huge challenge when making a VR game, obviously, but it’s important to not neglect the audio experience as well. Selling a sense of true presence is just as much a matter of convincing your ears and mind as it is your eyes.

In the above exclusive video the team at Hexany Audio, who worked in collaboration with Seismic Games on Blade Runner: Revelations, divulge many of the behind-the-scenes learnings and tricks discovered along the way while working on the VR game. It’s an insightful collection of interviews.

Blade Runner: Revelations is currently available on the Google Play store and looks great inside either the Daydream View or Mirage Solo headset. If you get a chance to try it out, let us know what you think down in the comments below!

Next month will see VR and AR developers come together to highlight progressive uses of both technologies at the 2018 XR for Change Summit in New York City.

The event, which takes place on June 30th as part of the wider Games for Change Festival, will feature nine experiences in its Immersive Arcade section. Included in the list are two projects born out of Oculus’ VR for Good initiative in She Flies by Her Own Wings, created in partnership with The Pride Foundation, and Meeting a Monster, from Good and Life After Hate. Tiger Tron’s Jupiter & Mars, the underwater exploration game coming soon to PlayStation VR (PSVR), will also be on display.

Along with the arcade, the Summit will feature a range of talks and panels from some of the biggest names in progressive VR and AR. That includes Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Labs Director, Kamal Sinclair, who will discuss the pitfalls and benefits of working with these new platforms, and UNICEF Innovation VR & Event Lead, Chris Szymczak, who will discuss the charity’s work in VR and AR.

The full programme can be seen here.

“After carefully listening to many voices across different parts of our community about building on the success of the inaugural VR for Change Summit, we decided to expand the focus of the Summit to XR to incorporate other emerging technology in the hopes of being more inclusive for more developers,” said Susanna Pollack, President of Games for Change, in a prepared statement. “We believe there is tremendous potential for impact in all of these technologies and look forward to nurturing a community that can explore the full breadth of possibilities in making social good experiences.”

If VR and Ar have proven anything over the past few years it’s that both technologies that the power to make a real impact on people’s lives, and events like this showcase perhaps some of the most important work being done with the tech as a result.

Beat Saber confirms what we all knew: two lightsabers are better than one. But, as fun as dual-wielding laser swords is, wouldn’t it be cool to use them like Darth Maul, too?

One player is doing just that.

One fan of Hyperbolic Magnetism’s popular VR rhythm game is channeling his Phantom Menace in the best way possible using the ProTube VR peripheral. This adaptable add-on holds your VR controllers and can be twisted and turned to resemble virtual objects. In the case of Beat Saber, though, it just needs to hold one of the two VR controllers at each end. In VR, that gives you two lightsabers stuck together, just like Darth Maul’s.

As you can see from the video above, it does make the game a little less practical; Beat Saber’s existing levels are designed with two free hands in mind so it’s not possible to slice every note. But what you lack in high score you’ll more than make up for in feeling like you’ve become one of the most iconic baddies in Star Wars history. We’re sure Maul would be thrilled to learn of his inclusion in VR’s funkiest game if he was, y’know, still alive.

Still, with Beat Saber getting its custom level editor, you could now make levels that cater to different styles of ligthsabers. Call me old fashioned but I’d like to try the game with just the trust blue blade.

Presenting at VRX Europe, the CEO of studio nDreams estimated there are nearly 15 million monthly active users split across high-end VR, mobile VR and cardboard.

nDreams CEO Patrick O’Luanaigh’s talk was framed around Mark Zuckerberg’s goal of getting “1 billion people in VR”, and O’Luanaigh discussed what might make that achievable by 2025.

“I strongly believe that nearly every VR headset being used in 2025 will have both 6dof inside-out tracking and either 6dof controllers or Leap Motion style hand tracking,” O’Luanaigh explained. “We’ll look back on current headsets with their cables, requirement to use a mobile, PC or console, and external sensors in the same way as we look back on old Nokia mobiles or Atari consoles. I also think most headsets will use 5G cloud ‘edge’ rendering by 2025 to deliver console quality visuals on very cheap headsets/glasses with sub 10ms latency from moving your hand to seeing an image.”

O’Luanaigh said his estimates for the current VR market size come from a variety of sources including analysts and conversations with folks in the industry. Device manufacturers have been publicly quiet about sales figures, though Samsung and Sony shared some milestones. Overall, solid indications of the growth or health of the VR market have been sparse. There has been the occasional indie software developer sharing apps sales figures — like Beat Saber or H3VR — but that only offers a look into a slice of the available market. nDreams has shipped a number of VR titles on a variety of platforms, so O’Luanaigh’s figures make for a notable estimate.

The monthly active user figure O’Luanaigh shared assumes there is an install base of 4.5 million “High End” VR headsets, 9 million “Mobile VR” headsets alongside more than 12 million cardboard headsets. The figure also bundles in some assumptions to get to the monthly active user estimate, including different percentages of each category headset in use each month as well as a multiple to account for headsets being shown to more than one person.

What matters, in my view, is what kind of VR content sells the best, and what kind of VR hardware enables it to do so.

“Based on our sales, and the average price points, I strongly suspect that the average high-end user spends more on VR than the average mobile VR user,” O’Luanaigh said.

That fits in line with our expectations regarding the increasing immersion and agency experienced in the kind of hand-controlled VR we love on Rift, Vive and PS VR. The estimates, though, also raise questions about just how successful the first generation of standalone VR headsets will be. Is there still time for headsets with pointer-only controllers to expand the market before standalone headsets with full hand controls arrive?

There are countless gun-based VR shooters on the market, but very few multiplayer-focused bow and arrow shooters. Luckily, oVRshot is a solid option to fill that gap a bit. When we first played the game before it hit Early Access the biggest issues we had were the slow locomotion, lack of map variety, and some concerns with depth. This week, the latest update for oVRshot addresses all of those concerns and turns it into a much more robust and feature-rich experience.

This massive update introduces a brand new game mode, a whole new map, a new class, improved AI, and countless small tweaks and fixes across the board.

Demolition is the new game mode and it plays out a lot like the game mode of the same name in Call of Duty, or even one of Counter-Strike’s popular modes. One team is tasked with defending a bomb location while the other team must attack. This should serve as a nice change of pace in comparison to the king of the hill-style point defense mode that’s already in the game.

With this update there’s also a brand new class to play called the Scout, which is more of a stealth-based burst damage play style. Players will be able to turn invisible, use a grappling arrow to quickly rise up into the air or zip across the map (as shown in the GIF below) and even a rapid fire power that lets you rain down or blast tons of arrows out at once.

The new update should be live already for all players to check out, so if you’re playing oVRshot give it a try and let us know what you think down in the comments below!

Clothes maketh the man and woman in Warerplai’s turn-based AR strategy game. The immersive entertainment industry is currently neck-deep in smartphone-based AR applications. From established corporations such as Google attempting cross platform, multi-person shared experiences, to independent developers looking to bring classic Dungeons & Dragons gameplay into the 21st Century, groundbreaking new platforms such as

Though it may not be as popular as Tilt Brush, Blocks or Oculus Medium, Tvori remains one of VR’s most versatile and best art apps, allowing users to create and animate scenes regardless of skillset. The app’s latest update, arriving this month, allows you to create even better scenes.

One of the biggest additions to Tvori 0.3 is sound, for example. Not only can you now implement audio clips to be a part of your scene, but you can make them yourself inside VR using your headset’s microphone, too. Simply grab a virtual mic and you can create audio files that appear as orbs. Pick up and place those orbs just like you would any other object in Tvori to position the origin of the sound within the environment and then blend it with the existing animation framework to trigger timings.

In other words, you can take an audio file and place it inside a character’s head. It gives the illusion of the character model speaking and further expands what you can do with Tvori.

Sound isn’t the only thing you can import, though. You can now bring other 3D assets and images into Tvori. That means you could build new objects for a scene in a similarly simple creation suite like Blocks, for example, and then import it into the app to make something entirely unique, free of the existing assets the studio has already made. You can import and even animate skinned characters, too.

Finally, there’s a new keyframe animation mode, which will be familiar to anyone that’s been playing around with the animation suite in Quill. It allows for more controlled, precise animation that takes a bit of extra work compared to the usual system of picking up and moving objects, but the results can lead to more convincing overall animations. As for the existing animation, you can now add curves to travel lines the fine-tune the movement from one point to the other.

Once everything’s done, you can now export your creations as an FBX file, too.

Tvori remains in Early Access for now, though significant updates like this suggest the finished article will be one of VR’s most fully-featured creation apps. You can pick it up for $19.99, though that price may rise come full release.

Misplace your invitation to the royal festivities? Us too. Luckily ABC has all the British jubilation you can handle via their brand new AR experience. Things are beginning to heat up as what may very well be the biggest wedding of 2018 continues to inch closer. The world’s most popular redhead, Prince Harry, and retired

We’ve been keeping an eager eye on Downward Spiral: Horus Station since the launch of its prologue chapter last year, but now the full thing is nearly here.

The zero-gravity adventure, developed by Finland-based 3rd Eye Studios, will be releasing on PC on March 31st with optional support for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows VR headsets for $19.99/£14.99. The promised PS4 and PSVR release will come later this summer. You can get a pretty good idea of what the game’s all about in the third developer diary, which was also released this week.

Horus Station is a first-person adventure set onboard the titular space station. You explore the deserted facility, trying to uncover what’s happened to the crew. Along the way you’ll gather tools to solve puzzles and navigate obstacles in the environment. Weapons to fight drones and other enemies come as tools previous intended to repair the ship. The game can be played either in single-player or with a friend in a two-player co-op mode.

We’re looking forward to Horus Station largely because it looks like a full experience designed specifically around VR (even if the support is optional). It’s not often we see a full story-driven campaign in VR, let alone one that supports cooperative play. We’ll find out if the game lives up to our expectations later this month.

Last year, Virtuleap ran the first edition of the Global WebVR Hackathon to champion the open web as the best platform for mixed reality and to rally and catalyze content creators alongside partners like Mozilla, Google, Samsung Internet, Oculus, Microsoft, as well as dozens of other community partners from around the world.

We received 34 concepts by teams from across 13 countries, including the United States, the Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Japan, Finland, France, Spain, Russia, India, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The concepts were just as diverse, ranging from social VR and templates & tools, to healthcare & medicine and arts & crafts.

Next week, the hackathon returns for its second edition and has been rebranded to the “Global WebXR Hackathon” in honor of the forthcoming seismic-shifting upgrade to the WebXR API, a unified framework that welcomes WebAR into the family, allowing developers to create immersive content that runs on all VR and AR devices.

This round is sponsored by Supermedium, Mozilla and Samsung Internet, and will run from May 25th to June 24th. It will be much more focused than the last edition; limited to two very different tracks that will be announced on the start date. The prizes will consist of the best and latest VR and AR gear.

We have collected a diverse range of industry experts, influencers, and leaders for judges, with a range of backgrounds and skill-sets represented, including developers, designers, devrels, and marketing professionals. You can check out the full lineup on the hackathon teaser page.

Getting votes to support your concepts will be important, but we will also be giving brownie points to those creative developers that take advantage of the cross-modality potential that the WebXR API opens up to the industry. So, think bigger and expand your concepts to be accessible to the full spectrum of VR and AR devices.

While the hackathon ends on June 24, the party isn’t over then. Virtuleap has partnered with WebXR community pioneer, Damon Hernandez, to pass the baton to the upcoming “WebXR Week” global event that starts the day after, on June 25. We can’t share more details with you yet, but it’s going to be a week-long festival of WebXR learnings and collaborations hosted by WebXR advocates and hubs from around the world.

To make sure you stay up to date, follow Virtuleap on Twitter and register for the newsletter on the hackathon homepage. We are super thrilled to see what comes out of this next round and the cross-reality content that it is beckoning all creative developers to manifest on the open web. It is metaversal history in the making.

This is a promotional post not produced by the UploadVR staff. No compensation was exchanged for the creation of this content.

The May update for the Oculus Platform is here, and it should help you keep your VR schedule in order.

With this week’s update, Oculus is adding Events listings to Rift (the feature has been running on Gear VR since last year). Events make it easy to keep track of what’s going on with games and apps across Home, giving you notifications about things like free weekends, multiplayer tournaments and social VR meetups.

In the latest version of the desktop app you’ll find a new Events section that lets you subscribe to upcoming events like a Winner Takes All tournament in Poker VR or Game Night for Settles of Catan. If you’re on mobile (including the newly-launched Oculus Go), you can find the same section in the Oculus mobile app.

As for developers, you can customize and schedule Event listings on Oculus’ Developer Dashboard. This might prove to be a good way to improve discoverability of your app on the increasingly-crowded Oculus Store. Or, if you run a multiplayer game, it could help a dedicated community find the right time to jump online.

It’s not the most exciting update for Rift users, this month, but it is another month down until we get to the full launch of Oculus Home 2.0, which will feature important updates like social VR support within Rift’s hub world and more.

Did you know Konami cult classic, Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner, is getting another remaster? Well it is, and it’s going to have PSVR and SteamVR support. Judging by the trailer below, that’s a very good thing.

For those that don’t know, Zone of the Enders is a mech combat series in which players pilot Jehuty, an advanced combat suit capable of flight, fire and laser sword fighting. The traditional game is played from third-person, Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner – MARS, VR support will give you the chance to experience the action from a cockpit view for the first time. There’s also a Very Easy difficulty being added in if you want to just blow stuff up without any worries.

Not only that, but there’s all-new content that looks like it’s designed specifically for VR. You’ll get to explore a new hangar environment where Jehuty is docked, for example, and there are 3D model viewers, because of course there is in a VR game. If you’re playing on a standard screen then you’ll also be able to enjoy the game in 4K.

The remaster is due to hit PS4 and PC on September 6th. There’s no word on native Oculus Rift support yet but, hopefully, the game will run just fine with the headset through SteamVR.